David McNamara - Loves, kerbsides and goodbyes: a backpackers road

T he episodes in Loves, Kerbsides and Goodbyes come from nearly a decade-and-a-half of David McNamaras global travels on the backpackers road. Once graduated from university in Perth Western Australia, he travelled overseas and worked on TV series including Shameless and Vincent in Manchester UK as well as Rush and the Australian feature film Blessed in Melbourne between stints toting pack, camera and guitar across the world. From his travels he distils themes rather than places, the essence rather than the coating, and the harshness, tenderness, tension and adventure of shoestring backpacking. The eclectic variety of people and cultures, places and incidents, danger and humour, fear and wonder are the substance of Loves, Kerbsidesand Goodbyes. He says that budget travel is balancing instinct, sense and caution against adventure, compassion and living loose and is damn hard work rather than a lifestyle.

T hey come out of nowhere. We sit cross legged on Arambol beach facing each other so we have a set of eyes down opposite ends of the shore. Elinor is so sexy with her glasses on. We met in the wilds of Mongolia. And we met up again in Ulaanbaatar, and again in China and Malaysia. Chance and fate played their parts in this in the way in which we both allowed it without ever really discussing it. Despite borders and vast tracts of countries backpackers cross, recurring encounters with other travellers over entire continents become commonplace.

Elinor and I were wasabi and ginger. She had taken her contacts out because the sea salt and sand made her eyes infected. It was strange and entrancing getting to know her again in her elegant, black-framed glasses. Im not sure what had changed since Malaysia but Elinor with a ready-made spliff of charras hidden in her bra was a new, different Elinor. She seemed more engaging and funny, wacky and inspiring. Perhaps this was augmented by the knowledge she was leaving soon. For a relationship so unstructured and so punctured by time, it was surprising we had actually known each other for almost a year by the time we were on the Goa beach.

Goa makes easy comparisons. Its Cambodias Sihanoukville, Laoss Si Phu Don and Viang Vien, or Thailands Ko Pha Ngan, Kanchunaburi and Pai. The common elements are simple beach-side and riverside bamboo huts, cheap booze, restaurant and bar tabs which can stretch for days, late licences and easily available contraband without threat of enforcement or incarceration.

The Arambol area of Goa had a pronounced hippy community imbued with a pleasant and subdued atmosphere. So, we felt relatively safe when, drunk on Old Monk Rum at forty rupees a bottle with lemonade mixer, we rolled a couple of spliffs and trundled down to where the ocean waves broke on the shore.

Elinor kept whipping her head around to check my arc of vision, untrusting, sceptical of my ability to keep watch.

Is the coast clear? she asked.

Yes goddamnit, just light the spliff.

Her head flashes around over her shoulder for one last confirmation and suddenly three uniformed men with big bamboo canes are walking towards us. Who are they? Oh, yeah theyre police.

With no warning, the three officers had appeared out of the dark night to a background of heavily crashing waves, their long cane batons outlined by the hint of moonlight. I felt the scorch of Elinors glare before I met it, full of fear at the mini back-up spliff resting on my flip-flop. My stare withered her instinct to move, mutely telling her, Be still. I figured I was fucked.

Caught in such situations, I always take the path of divine defeat-ism, then pray like buggery and watch the elements slowly conspire against me. This is how I had seen life treat me in the past and I had become reconciled to it a long time ago. And I knew I was fucked purely by the proximity of the slightly conical-shaped cigarette and neighbouring pouch of Drum rolling tobacco.

Armed with Nokia phones for torches, the police embarked on a search and interrogation exercise more arrant farce than textbook investigation. The handsets intermittently beeped as they punched their keypads to reactivate display screen backlights. They dug like dogs in the sand between us for spent roaches and evidence of illegal activity. The entire lack of forensic, professional or even mundane preparation seemed to underscore their pejorative intent and surreally heighten the threat.

I almost got away with it, too. But as two of the officers gave up and put their phones away, one final sweep by the third caught sight of the spliff beside me. He lifted it suspiciously and the three entered into a charade of sniffing it, passing it along, breaking it open, sniffing it again, examining the tobacco under mobile phone light and conferring.

They ordered me to stand and told me they were taking me to the station. I knew enough that a show of innocence was imperative. But I was unravelling at the edges, losing it somewhat while claiming, as calmly as I could, that it was just a cigarette. Where was my prized sangfroid? Where did my Zen go? My heart was galumphing so loudly in my chest I was sure my eyeballs were resonating visibly to the beat of a guilty drum. And my brain was cursing me to act like a man in front of the girl I fancied, or I could forget about her. I tried pushing all my fraying energy and sundered nerves as deep into my gut as possible and got to my feet. Then Marc, a German who had joined us on the foreshore stood up.

He was tall and imposing with archetypal German effrontery. He acted with a forcible presence and voice and ripped his own pouch of Golden Virginia from his back pocket and declared:

He smokes tobacco, I smoke tobacco We do not smoke weed, okay? Marc repeated himself for good measure.

To speculate it was a set-up based on the officers absurd incompetence was validated by their swift retreat. Marcs guff and actions made us not worth the trouble. They immediately patted the air and told us to sit back down and not to worry. I had been saved by three things: First, we had sensibly rolled the joints in the privacy of our bungalows before venturing out; secondly, it was pure luck we had run out of charras and I was forced to roll a very light second joint into an unassuming single Rizla paper; and finally, there was Marc and his spontaneous hurt and unflappable posturing.

In regions such as Goa where tourism generates so much rev-enue, illicit and riotous behaviour are commonly indulged. Minor discretions are tolerated, arrests are rare and when they do occur they seldom result in convictions because of corruption and bribery.

This, in part, shapes backpackers insouciance that you can always buy your way out of anything. The smart traveller always offers high and offers fast, because if you dont and you end up at a police station then the more uniformed officials you pass through the greater the number of people to be paid off and the cost of freedom soars.

Later, I wondered what motivated the officers to try to shake us down. Were they not being paid enough, not paid off, or was it simply greed? Shakedowns invariably occur where an officious state nurtures a lack of accountability mixed with fiscal desperation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kremlin police were notorious for exacting false fines over bullshit visa offences. My Sydney uni mate Maccas spent forty minutes with two Russian cops who threatened to take him to a police station over the bureaucratic regulation which behoves travel ers to register in a city after spending more than three consecutive days there. Maccas held firm knowing the rules and Moscows reputation. But so, too, did the police. And when they finally declared he would have to go with them to the nearest police station, Maccas did not protest but immediately fol owed knowing he was in compliance with the regulation and the men simply peeled away from him in different directions.